Ox and Finch, Glasgow, review — what a comeback
It's hardly front page news to say that Ox and Finch — routinely on the list of Glasgow's best restaurants — is … still one of Glasgow's best restaurants. But there's something to be said (that isn't said nearly enough) for the casual restaurants that set the trends, are universally loved, and last the course. Ox and Finch is Scotland's ur-example.
It was just over a decade ago that it opened in a quiet part of quietly-turning-foodie Finnieston with a curious new dining concept called sharing plates. Which is now so ubiquitous it's the ultimate of restaurant clichés. After being closed for refurbishment for six months, Ox and Finch has returned with a zhuzhed-up look, a gifted head chef, Craig Nelson, who returns to Ox
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Glasgow Times
an hour ago
- Glasgow Times
What we know so far about Glasgow's newest culture hub
Clydeside Containers, a food, drink, and culture venue, is set to launch at 61 Broomielaw this summer. The venue aims to become a new Glasgow city centre landmark and anticipates to attract high footfall due to its location next to the Riverboat Casino on the Broomielaw. 3D-renders of Clydeside Containers (Image: Supplied) Read more: Glasgow to host romantic candlelight concert based on hit Netflix show Constructed entirely from modified shipping containers, the venue will include an open-plan bar, six independent food vendors, a breakfast kitchen, and flexible space for public events, performances, and activations. The venue's retractable roof will shelter some of Glasgow's best street food, alongside a curated drinks menu featuring major spirits brands, beer, and affordable classics. Food vendors set to feature at the venue include the Crumbleologist, Pizza Cult, Café XO, Rabbit Food, Greek Street Yeeros, and Sub 126. Meanwhile, the final unit within the hub is set to become a rotating guest pitch, showcasing independent traders and pop-ups. Any operator looking for a chance to highlight their concepts at the venue are encouraged to apply online here: Clydeside Containers is also designed to become a cultural hub with community programming, live podcasts, acoustic sessions, and up to 12 larger live music events planned for every year. The venue has partnered with organisations such as the RNLI to become a Water Safety Ambassador, with more partnerships to be announced. 3D-renders of Clydeside Containers (Image: Supplied) Read more: New park could become 'destination' attraction for Glasgow families The team behind Clydeside Containers is made up of Glasgow-based hospitality operators and cultural creatives with experience in delivering successful venues and community-driven projects. It is led by the team behind venues like Max's Bar, La Cheetah Club, Mikaku, and Room 2. The venue will be open seven days a week, starting with breakfast from 7am on weekdays, with core hours running until 10pm. An official opening date is due to be announced soon, with a full launch expected in late summer.
The National
3 hours ago
- The National
Why your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man gives you the ‘ick' factor
That shimmering street grid, and those sandstone bases of unbuilt skyscrapers, will host the most everyday superhero of the current Marvel Universe. Everyday, in every way. It's not just Peter Parker's tentative romance with Mary Jane Watson (and her variants), or his wracked grief on the deaths of his adoptive parents, or his humdrum job as a freelance photographer. But it's also his powers; they too partake of the everyday. In his earliest incarnation, Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider, escaped from an experiment. Spider-Man first appears in the nuclear-haunted, cold-warring mid-60s, where the lingering effects of radiation on babies and animals were well known. Not to mention the beginning of plausible genetic engineering. Watching the precursor to the forthcoming Glasgow-based movie, 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home, it's notable that all the villains assembled – Doctor Octopus, Green Goblin, Sandman, Lizard, Electro – have gained their malevolent powers through exposure to radiation, or biological/cyborg experiment. Just like Spider-Man. READ MORE: 'Ludicrous': BBC bias claims reignite as majority of panellists back Labour Doth this 'good' mutant protest too much against the 'bad' ones? The citizens are consigned to the role of spectators (or squished collateral damage) as these super-humans fight for supremacy. No amount of Peter Parker homeliness – he is your 'friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man', after all, happiest when arresting street thugs – can hide his posthuman weirdery. No Way Home might be the eighth-biggest-grossing movie of all time, but it's lame in the way it resolves this tension – where body modification turns towards good or ill. Parker and friends test-tube up some remedies for the villains, transforming them back into their humdrum, benign human selves. But then Doctor Strange – played by a somnolent Benedict Cumberbatch – has to then 'magic' them back into the parallel universes they've come from. The current Spidey-verse – with a guileless Tom Holland in the title role – is, at this late stage in the Marvel franchise, a bewildering mix of superpowers. Under the techno-influence of Tony Stark, the old struggles with the Spidey costume – stitching it together, hauling it on, repairing rips – are now an automated swoosh from suit to suit. There's also a very funny sequence where previous Spider-Men from parallel universes (Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield) explore their web-making powers. Garfield and Holland have to keep refilling their cartridges, while Maguire produces it subcutaneously from his wrist (which was creator Stan Lee's original mutation). 'Does it come out anywhere else?' asks Holland guilelessly. This is a nod to the obvious metaphor: the yearning young adult Parker suddenly suffers a condition where white sticky fluid unpredictably erupts everywhere … The actors are given enough room to riff on it. So we're laughing, these days. But I don't think any amount of irony and eyebrow-raised referencing can reduce the essential strangeness of Spider-Man – and for that matter, X-Men, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Black Widow, Ant-Man, I could go on. All of them are the victims of science and technology either gone wrong, or consciously applied to the body, resulting in imposed or desired superpowers. As the box office shows, the appetite is there for stories, however fantastic, of human biomodification. You could render them as giant compensation fantasies. We're coping with our everyday sense of bodily vulnerability to the outcomes of sci-tech, through entertainments that show us gaining power from it – not being polluted and made more fragile and dependent by it. Yet it strikes me that we are much more resistant to the transformations of bioscience than we are to the transformations of AI and automation. We consume all manner of creative narratives, both desirable and cautionary, about computers becoming conscious or purposeful – and it all seems more like a lubricant to the spread of AI in our lives than an inhibitor. When it comes to us and our bags of skin, however, we're just not as embracing of the radical bio-changes that the superheroes undergo, willingly or unwillingly. The safest vector is through disability or health. The pills and therapies that suppress appetite, attack viruses, enable pregnancies, and (who knows) slow down cell decay to prolong life. Even that avatar of techno-weirdness, Elon Musk, who wants to neurologically link brains and computers, does so first in service of the paralysed, giving them some much-needed agency and purchase in the material world. Yet we appear to have an unarticulated, deeply-set norm that kicks back against too much of this. The 'ick' factor is certainly present. Take the Enhanced Games that took place in Singapore the other week. Sportspersons competed in athletics which ignored the fuzzy line between legal performance-enhancing substances and illegal ones. But the games languished under waves of aversive, sometimes even revulsed press coverage. So we revel in the superheroic cavortings of cyborgs and mutants on our screens, while objecting to already finely-calibrated athletic bodies taking a few seconds off a track record, by expanding the pharmacopoeia of their drugs. I'm not complaining! Indeed, I'm desperately grateful that there seems to be some kind of natural, intuitive limit to the kinds of transformations we moderns of the 2020s are willing to undergo. Even the blockbuster entertainments are telling us something obvious, as the Earth is (yet again) threatened with total annihilation in their narratives. Which is that it ultimately, terminally matters how we humans consciously deploy our transforming powers in the world. I will admit to enjoying these bionic characters as modern mythological gods, cartoonishly laying out important dilemmas for us. However, I sometimes crave sci-fi tales in a much subtler register. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is interesting to set alongside these bombastic tales. In its way, it's hardly less monstrous. The whole society in this novel is stable, settled, orderly and utterly cruel: the institutionalised children in it are clones, being grown to adulthood so that they their organs can be harvested for clients. The supportive relationships that comprise much of the novel are to support the weakening young adults, as they are weakened by the surgeries they undergo. This is body modification, but all about submission to the process, accommodating its demands. It's far from radiation, gene therapy or prosthetics enabling you to leap tall buildings with a single bound. Bio-heroes in the blockbusters conduct their sparring in the public sphere, as if they're conducting an oblique argument about the society they're in. For No Way Home, they literally battle across the surface of a scaffolded Statue of Liberty. They're also constantly pursued by an Alex-Jones-like vlogger, casting Spidey as a public enemy. In Never Let Me Go, the bio-subjects are held in a pastoral enclosure, erased from the world that depends on their sacrifice. The crowds gawp at the superheroes: faced with Ishiguro's bureaucratic horror, the crowds avert their eyes. The superheroes at least ask: What happens when your body has power and potential, when what you can do with it amplifies your agency? Ishiguro asks: what happens when the body simply becomes somebody's property? The Spider-Man producer Amy Pascal says the new film will be about 'Peter Parker going to focus on being Spider-Man, because being Peter Parker was too hard'. Cute: his pursuit of Zendaya, as his girlfriend with a now wiped memory of him, will no doubt humanise the story. But Spider-Man – and we haven't even touched on arachnophobia (or is that arachnophilia?) – is properly odd, if you scrutinise him closely enough, and line him up with all his bionic pals. There are important tensions about humanity, technology and the future, hidden behind that bug-eyed mask.
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
The Golden Spurtle review – a cosy celebration of porridge and its champions
The word 'porridge' to me evokes something modest and satisfying: mouthfuls of reliable pleasantness in a terribly volatile world. How lovely that The Golden Spurtle – Constantine Costi's charming documentary about the world's annual porridge-making championship in the Scottish village of Carrbridge – has assumed some of the qualities of the dish. It isn't flashy (and certainly doesn't scream 'must-watch') but, like a good ol' fashioned bowl of well-cooked oats, it's got it where it counts. This film is a pleasure to watch – with endearing salt-of-the-earth subjects, a lovely ebb and flow, and a tone that feels just right: neither overly serious nor tongue in cheek. Its appeal is not dissimilar to the Australian comedy series Rosehaven: sometimes it's just nice to escape into a fresh air-filled world with refreshingly low stakes. Even if the competitors, gawd luv 'em, treat the competition very seriously. The Golden Spurtle is also lovely to look at. It's displayed in a tucked-in 4:3 aspect ratio that has a slightly antiquated feel, which suits the material. The opening shot features a grassy field overlaid with text declaring that every year Carrbridge hosts the titular tournament, though the upcoming event is a little different: it's the last to be led by its head organiser, Charlie Miller, who is hanging up his stirring spoon after many years of service. This contextualises what comes next as an end-of-empire narrative, belonging to a pantheon of stories about dynasties that changed the course of history and rattled the tectonic, erm, oatmeal bowls of existence. Early moments introduce places in and around Carrbridge – including a pub and a cemetery – before we meet competitors and people of note in the world of rolled oats. They include the Australian taco chef Toby Wilson, who packs up a portable kitchen and flies with it across the world, and is competing against the likes of Nick Barnard, the co-founder of a wholesome food company who is 'burning with desire' to triumph after having made the finals several times. I wondered whether we'd meet the equivalent of a moustache-twirling villain: someone comparable perhaps to the cocksure Billy Mitchell from the video game documentary King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters – the reigning Donkey Kong champion who stopped at nothing to protect his throne. I initially thought we might have found one in Ian Bishop, a former world champion and porridge-making legend who returns for another crack and is confident he'll win. But this 'man of mystery' turns out to be pretty likable too. I also wondered whether there'd be any wild, revolutionary figures that upended tradition and blazed a mushy new path forward – the Jimi Hendrix of porridge cooking. Sadly not, though we do learn of a competitor who one year brought with him a deep fryer, which was considered 'dangerous' and 'crazy'. Momentum builds in the lead-up to the big day, when crowds pack into Carrbridge's modest community hall, where, for some reason, a whisky-tasting event is also taking place. People involved in The Golden Spurtle tend to, quite adorably, emphasise their own importance: one of the kitchen crew assures us, with a cheeky wee gleam in her eyes, that this is 'the boiler house of the world porridge championships', where all the important action takes place. It's all very sweet and agreeable: a palate-pleasing celebration of the noble oat. The Golden Spurtle is showing at Sydney film festival on 7, 14 and 15 June and will get a general Australian release later this year. A UK release has yet to be announced.
